Tag Archives: writing

It was November 1990, back when I lived in Providence. A short, offhand blurb on page four of the local paper for which I wrote quietly announced that Kurt Vonnegut would be in town to address Brown University students at Alumnae Hall. “Check to see if any tickets remain,” said the article. Say what?!?

In exactly twenty-fours, one of the major writers of the twentieth century and my all-time hero was scheduled to appear at my very door. My chances of getting a ticket now were about as slim as finding a rent-controlled apartment in Trump Tower. Nonetheless, I ran like a bad rumor over to Brown—only to be told that all 600 tickets had been handed out a week ago, two tickets per Brown ID. It was shaping up to be blue Monday, indeed.

“Why don’t you just go over there and tell them you write for a local newspaper?” asked my wife in a cheery, optimistic voice. “There’s your ticket.”

Raising my head slowly out of a bowl of soggy corn flakes in which I was trying to drown myself, I looked at her and laughed. “Yeah, right. With hundreds of bigwig journalists there, from George Wills and Mark Patinkin to Hunter Thompson and, who knows, maybe Tom Wolfe, do you really think they’re going to let me in there? Don’t be absurd.”

“Got any better ideas?” asked Josie, in her gentle tone of why-did-I-marry-this-jerk sarcasm.

I did not. So I called the Brown News Bureau and introduced myself. “Hello, my name is Gene Twaronite and I write for The East Side Monthly. I’ve been assigned to write an article on the Vonnegut lecture. I was wondering if …”

“Who did you say you are?” asked the young woman. “Isn’t that the paper that runs all those disgusting sex ads?”

“No, that’s the other paper,” I reassured her. “We only run ads for poodles and politicians.”

“A press conference has been scheduled for three,” she said. “Just show your press card at the door. There will also be a section reserved for the media at tonight’s lecture.”

“I don’t have a press card. My publisher says they’re too expensive.”

“Are you sure you’re a writer?” she asked, like I was something from the bottom of a dumpster.

After a short enumeration of my writing credits and the promise that I would throw myself off the Point Street Bridge if I didn’t get to see Vonnegut, she reluctantly agreed to meet me later at the door. I will remember her kindness always.

Shortly before three, I was allowed to enter and ushered into the inner sanctum—a small side room of the Maddock Alumni Center. Furtively I looked around, still expecting someone to challenge my credentials. But the expected horde of media hounds had so far failed to materialize. There wasn’t even a podium or microphone in sight. Just a few dozen folding chairs set in front of an overstuffed pink chair in a corner near the window.

Journalists started trickling into the room, though none of them were from the NY Times or Newsweek. There were eighteen of us in all, many from student newspapers. Tom Wolfe was nowhere to be seen.

Expecting to get no closer than 500 feet, I had brought with me a 300 mm telephoto lens for my camera, which I hoped would also certify me as a bona fide journalist. I had also equipped myself with a crisp new first edition of Vonnegut’s latest novel Hocus Pocus. One never knows.

Suddenly, he appeared. Wearing a dark grey suit, tie, and V-neck sweater, he strode gracefully into the room like a wise, beloved professor and quietly took his seat. Then, as if addressing old friends, he began to talk in a soft, reassuring voice.

“I’ll be speaking six times this year, speaking in some strange places … though this isn’t one of them.”

Then he launched into his opening remarks about the deplorable state of the country today and how “we are miserably led.” As he warmed to his subject, the pace and intensity of his words picked up. He described the choice of Dan Quayle for vice-president as “a terrible insult to the American people.” Sitting back and crossing his legs, he reminded me of a less flamboyant Mark Twain. His hollow, slightly vacant eyes—eyes that had seen too much yet never enough of this crazy world—stared back at us with a mixture of mirth and madness, inviting us to join the party. “Life is fooling around.”

With the precise timing of a good comic, he fired off one extravagant remark after another, occasionally interspersing them with common sense observations revealing the intense humanism that fueled his cynicism.

“I can understand people wanting to be doctors or lawyers or teachers. But people who want to be managers, well … something is wrong with them.”

“Government’s a TV show.”

“The ideal government is an extended family.”

“I took my junior civics course in grade school very seriously.”

Asked by Providence Journal-Bulletin reporter Bob Kerr if “there is anyone you find particularly hopeful,” Vonnegut replied without hesitation. “Yes, the American people.”

Swallowing hard, I finally summoned the courage to ask my own question. “In your novel Galapagos, you raised the point that our brains may be too big for our own good. Do you …?”

He cut me off, delighted to be given this tangent, and went on to compare our brains to the ridiculously over-sized antlers of the extinct Irish elk. “Nature may have made a mistake.”

For a few more minutes, Vonnegut bantered with the media. He came to lecture, he told us, usually at the invitation of students, not faculty. He doubted if anyone from the English Department would be in attendance that night. To hear him tell it, he was a virtual nobody in the academic world. (This despite the fact that a seminar on his works was held by the Modern Language Association at its annual international convention back in 1975, where he was compared to such world class authors as Nabokov, Swift, and Twain. It was not the first or the last of such seminars)

Lost in sad reverie over one of his parting comments that “there were a lot of swell writers in the world who just weren’t ever going to be noticed,” I was caught by surprise when suddenly the author bolted out of his chair and began heading for the door. I remembered the book in my knapsack and lunged to intercept him.

He was almost home free, but I nabbed him just in time. “Mr. Vonnegut,” I asked in a timid voice. “This may seem tacky, but …would you mind signing my book?”

“Not at all,” he replied, staring at me with those wild, wonderful eyes of his. Then on the endpaper he made his famous scribble, complete with a certain orifice that some people mistake for a star.

That evening, having been told that press seats would be limited, I arrived at Alumnae Hall forty-five minutes early. I needn’t have worried. The first three rows on the left had been reserved for me and my fellow journalists. Being the first one there, I sat down in my privileged seat as the hall quickly filled to capacity and overflowed to the balcony and much of the floor.

Actually, the best seats in the house were reserved for the creative writing class. And sitting among the students, as if to nullify the author’s earlier prediction, were some unmistakably professorial types.

I was especially interested in hearing what Vonnegut had to say about how to be a writer. This time, there was a podium and even a blackboard. Right on time, he stepped up to the microphone and began to address the crowd with the same unpretentious grace as that afternoon.

He introduced himself as having been born of the last generation of novelists “whose brains were marinated in books.” He then told us that, if as some people claim, rock ‘n’ roll can cause suicides, he did not want anyone to read his latest book.

Commenting on the Voyager Spacecraft’s trip past the Outer Planets, the author displayed his scientific bias, proclaiming this “the most beautiful thing humans have ever done. Just think of it—we made that thing!”

For a while, he read animatedly from a prepared speech, which emphasized the darker side of his worldview. “We are swamped with bad news,” he reminded us, then ran through a checklist of his most deeply felt social and environmental issues, as if making sure we all knew he wasn’t just some flaky novelist.

He even slipped in a quick lesson on transcendental meditation, describing this state as like “scuba diving in warm bouillon.” Then he compared it to reading—“the meditative state of Western Society.”

Finally, he got around to the topic I’d been waiting for, though I really didn’t expect he’d have much to say. In his diverse collection of essays and stories, Wampeters, Foma & Grandfalloons, he wrote that “you can’t teach people to write well. Writing well is something God lets you do or declines to let you do. (This from an avowed atheist.)

He told us there are two main ways to support yourself as a writer: inherit money, or marry a rich person.

He then gave us one of his cardinal rules of revision—throw away the first three pages of any manuscript. It’s just needless introductory clutter.

Stepping to the blackboard, he began to draw graphs illustrating the curvature of various kinds of stories. He was always trying to bring much-needed science to English departments.

At the end of his lecture, commenting on the changing nature of student questions these days, he recalled that back when he was a young man on campus, when the world seemed to be in flames and Europe and Asia were on the verge of being swallowed up by Hitler, the burning question was: “Does penis size really matter?”

Whereas now the question he is asked most frequently is: “Do you use a word processor?” I detected a note of sadness in his voice.

So it goes.

(Author’s Note: An earlier version of this piece first appeared in East Side Monthly, Providence, RI.)

Ever heard of the Fitz-Greene Halleck? Didn’t think so. How about Herman Melville? Sure, everyone’s heard about him. Yet both were failures, in a sense. At one time, Halleck was one of the most famous poets of his century. Now he’s pretty much a nobody. And while Melville’s classic Moby Dick continues to be read and revered today, it was largely ignored by the reading public of his day, who much preferred his early inferior works. These and other examples are explored in this wonderful witty essay by Stephen Marche in the NY Times Sunday Review. It is a must read for all writers as well as would-be writers – “those who have failed to be writers in the first place.” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/27/opinion/sunday/failure-is-our-muse.html?_r=0

My new Teacher’s Guide for Dragon Daily Newsis now available as a Kindle title. This 26-page teaching guide has been written to accompany the stories in my book Dragon Daily News: Stories of Imagination for Children of All Ages. Its chief aim is to provide background on the genesis of each story while stimulating ideas and discussion for the creation of students’ own stories. Each chapter applies elements of the Common Core Writing Standards, and includes a brief Author’s Notes, a Literary Nuts & Bolts discussion of how the story is put together, and Suggested Ideas for Stories to fire the imagination. Parents will also find this a useful enrichment tool as they share these stories with their children.

How many of us would have read a novel or gone to see a movie if its title were Trimalchio in West Egg or The High-Bouncing Lover? Yet those were titles under serious consideration by F. Scott Fitzgerald before his editor convinced him to change it to The Great Gatsby. The rest is history. You can read more about the relationship between the editor Maxwell Perkins and writers such as Fitzgerald, Thomas Wolfe, and Ernest Hemingway in this excellent article recently published in Publishers Weeklyhttp://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/authors/pw-select/article/59767-why-all-self-publishers-need-a-good-editor.html

The point should be obvious: if even great writers such as these needed editors, then you do, too. “The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in, shock-proof, shit detector,” Hemingway famously wrote. “This is the writer’s radar and all great writers have had it.” But let’s face it, most of us lack the ability to see our writing in clear, objective fashion. We are too close to our writing. Our precious words are too much a part of ourselves. And they will not go gently into the trash bin. Yet time and again I hear fellow writers tell me that they do all their own editing, or that their English teacher sisters, aunts, or spouses do it for them. Yes, we all need to edit ourselves as we write and revise. And we can all use a little help from critical readers. But there comes a time when we must divorce ourselves from our work to see it as others—namely readers—might see it. And that is where your editor comes in.

Some writers are fortunate to have editors assigned to them by their publishing houses. Other writers, like myself, have had the good fortune to work with magazine or newspaper editors whose job it is to shape a rough manuscript into a thing of beauty. And I think of all the good editors at literary journals around the globe who tirelessly read our submissions, rejecting most of them, but finally choosing ours to represent their publications or, more rarely, sharing their helpful comments on what would make a story or poem work for them. I am grateful to these editors, too, who have helped me become a better writer not only by accepting my work, but by rejecting it. Some of these editors have even become friends. Yet, with the increased availability of self-publishing options, so often today writers rush into self-publishing without first vetting their work in this time-honored fashion.

Despite my early positive experiences with editors, when it came time to publish my first novel I too was pig-headed. After all, I was a pretty mean editor myself (or so I thought). I also had the help of my lovely spouse and first reader. Best of all, I had my sister “editor,” who—you guessed it—just happens to be an English teacher. What else did I need? A lot, it turned out. The self-publishing process was a painful, brutal, but ultimately useful lesson in just why I needed an editor. As Exhibit A, one example comes to mind. The original working title of my middle grade novel was actually “How to Get Rid of Your Family.” It sounds like the main character killed and chopped up his family, then stuffed them into the trunk of a Chevrolet wagon. Fortunately cooler heads prevailed, and I changed the title to The Family That Wasn’t. Though the book was eventually self-published and went on to favorable reviews, I could have saved myself a lot of trouble by having a professional editor in the first place. Oh well, some of us have to learn the hard way.

Which brings me to the real reason why I wrote this post. I’d like to introduce you to my friend and editor—not my wife or sister, but one who does this for a living—Kate Robinson. I’ll let her tell you why need an editor:

Each writer has a different approach to the writing craft. For me, the creative process is as essential as taking my next breath. I write to understand, exploring life’s mandala through the perspectives of “reality” and “imagination.”

Why hire an editor?Sometimes writers need a fresh pair of eyes, some pre-publication polish, or coaching to hone their writing chops.

Kate Robinson at Starstone Lit Services specializes in proofreading, editing, evaluation, and creative consultation for fiction, memoir, and narrative nonfiction writers. Experienced, thoughtful evaluation and editing of soft sci-fi, fantasy / slipstream, historical, chick lit, thriller, mystery, and literary works; poetry, memoir, and young adult / juvenile fiction and nonfiction. Also available for consultation, editing, and proofreading for textbook and academic writers and publishers, as well as for business professionals: theses, dissertations, journal articles, resumes, brochures, business letters, print or internet advertising, blog and website copy, and mass mailings. Indexing services for selected nonfiction topics and e-book conversions and print formatting for all standard manuscripts.